Daughters of the Nile

by Stephanie Dray

  “Yes, I know.” For hundreds of years my family funded the Olympic Games. There is even a gymnasium there named after my illustrious ancestor. Of all the reasons for my enmity with the King of Judea, this is surely the most petty, but it irritates me like a rash I cannot scratch. “Herod will get away with it. All of it. Augustus has done nothing to punish him. He allowed Herod his show trial, he allowed Herod to make veiled accusations against Julia, he allowed Herod to go about boasting that he is King Herod Philokaiser … the friend of Caesar. And what’s more, Herod has now convinced the emperor to give him the profits from the copper mines in Cyprus.”

  This sobers my poet, who understands the importance of that last bit. Cyprus was part of the Ptolemaic empire—part of the kingdom that should have been mine. Part of the kingdom that could still belong to my children. That Augustus took my ancestral lands for himself is painful enough; that he should cede any part of it to the King of Judea is beyond endurance.

  Crinagoras is plainly shaken. “So Herod does want Egypt. He dares to think … he will try again to arrange a marriage with your daughter.”

  “Yes. He will keep trying. He is that brazen. The rest of the world thinks King Herod is the emperor’s exotic pet lion—a creature to let loose in the arena for amusement or to set upon enemies when convenient—but one that needs periodic beating with a whip to keep tame. But I know better than to trust Herod can be tamed or that it is the emperor who holds the whip.”

  “Then Herod is your rival,” my poet says, slowly.

  “Yes. Herod is my rival,” I agree. Herod is my rival in the way none of the emperor’s friends or mistresses have ever been. Herod is my rival because he has intuited the emperor’s need to be appreciated by those who understand the full measure of what he has accomplished.

  Herod is part of the old guard. He has been playing the game longer than any of us. He knows how to woo the emperor, to seduce him on an equal footing, withholding from him the empty adulation of the masses. I have seen him do it before; he did it even during the trial when he spoke to the emperor as one father to another.

  It has taken me far too long to realize that the emperor indulges Herod much as he has always indulged me. Herod is a threat. If not to me, then to my dynasty. But I will never let Herod have Egypt. I will never let him have my daughter. And I will never again think of him as a petty irritant. I must crush Herod under the heel of my silvered sandal by whatever means necessary.

  I am a Ptolemy. Our motto is Win or Die.

  I must find a way to engineer his fall. “You know that Herod once sent Lady Circe to my husband as a gift, as a spy.”

  “You should do the same to him, but he has so many wives I do not see how he could find the room in his bed for a hetaera too.”

  My poet has finally drawn me to the point of our visit. “I intend to put a spy in his court, but it cannot be a whore. Herod does not trust women. Yet, he is vain enough to trust flatterers …”

  “Your Majesty,” Crinagoras says carefully, “I believe you are about to do something enormously foolish.”

  Knowing that he has guessed at my intentions, I glance up over my cup of warmed wine. “Am I?”

  “Yes,” he drawls, drawing out the word. Then, just when I think he will refuse me, he smiles. “You are about to quarrel with the world’s greatest living poet. Without regard for his unsurpassed talent and the damage it will do to the beleaguered state of the arts in your kingdom, you are about to dismiss me from your service. In a fit of royal pique, you are going to take offense to a wonderfully witty remark that amuses everyone but pricks at your Ptolemaic pride.”

  “You are not as witty as you think you are, Crinagoras.”

  “Exactly what you will say before dismissing me from your service, seizing what pittance you pay me, and leaving me resentful and without passage home to Mytilene. Why, I will be forced to beg the indulgence of the Judeans to set sail with them …”

  He looks satisfied and amused with this plan.

  “Do you think Herod will be fooled? I worry that he will never offer you employment knowing that you’re an intimate of mine.”

  “Did he not steal Nicholas of Damascus from your mother? Herod attracts malcontents. He’d like nothing better than to stick it in your eye.”

  “But can you do it? You’re a poet, not a spy.”

  “Entertainers make the best spies. We’re easily overlooked.”

  It occurs to me that Crinagoras may very well have been spying upon me all these years. He’s been within my most intimate circle, privy to many of my secrets. And he’s right. It is very easy to overlook a poet—even one as ostentatious as mine …

  But my goddess can see into the heart of a man and know his true name, and I think this too may be in my gift. My poet has seen me through very dark days and I trust him. “It would be a very great risk, Crinagoras.”

  “I need the excitement,” he replies, eyes dancing with delight at the opportunity to make mischief. “When I first came to serve you, it was all storms and sorcery and royal pathos worthy of Homer. Now you’ve become so dreadfully domesticated …”

  “Domesticated!”

  “Oh, that’s very good. See how easy it is to offend you with a witty remark?”

  My jaw snaps shut. “How would you get information to me?”

  “Infrequently. I might send it with someone I trust or put it in a poem as a coded message you could read with a cipher. Lady Lasthenia is better suited to this kind of scheming … but she is in Mauretania and here I am, bored and willing. How long would you have me stay in Herod’s court?”

  “Until you found a way to destroy him.”

  “Splendid,” he says. “Then I offer my services without hesitation.”

  Ah, what a shiny prize he offers me. “If we really mean to do this, we must tell King Juba.”

  “Very well,” Crinagoras says, daring to roll his eyes at me. “But on the matter of your domestication, I rest my case …”

  *

  JUBA does not like the idea. “If your poet wants to leave, let him leave. If he wants to serve Herod, let him serve Herod. If he is caught sending you letters or receiving Mauretanian gold, we will be implicated.”

  Perched on the edge of my husband’s writing table, where I seek to win his approval—or at least distract him with peeks at my breasts and the scent of my lavender perfume—I say, “Then let us be implicated. How many letters did your hetaera send before you realized she was Herod’s spy?”

  Juba pretends to write upon a scroll but leaves only a scribble. “I knew what she was all along.”

  I do not believe him. “Still you took her for a lover?”

  He lifts his eyes from the page to stare at me in challenge, knowing that he has been caught in a prideful lie. “I took Lady Circe to bed to arouse your jealousy.”

  “That was poorly planned, since I did not learn of your love affair for nearly a year.”

  “It was not a love affair,” he snaps, trying to ride it out. Then color floods his cheeks. “I was lonely.”

  I smother a smile, for I am charmed beyond measure. “Why, husband, I did not know that loneliness could lead to such bad political judgment. I shall endeavor not to leave you lonely again …”

  His hard stare melts and he murmurs, “That might be best. For the good of the kingdom.”

  “Ah, for the good of the kingdom, what would I not do?” I ask, pressing an affectionate hand to his cheek to soothe his embarrassment. “Will you consent to send Crinagoras to Herod’s court?”

  “Will you obey me if I refuse?”

  I consider my answer. “Yes …”

  He considers my hesitation. “But then you will find another way to spy on Herod without telling me …”

  “Possibly.”

  “And you will resent me as an unworldly king …”

  “Probably.”

  “And either way, we will quarrel late into the evening?”

  “Certainly.”

  He leans bac
k, stretching his neck. “And just so I understand all the pertinent facts … even if I emerge victorious from this quarrel, I will lose a great deal of sleep tonight.”

  “You will lose several nights’ sleep and not for any pleasant reason.”

  He smirks. “Then you have my consent, Selene, because I must be up before dawn to ride out with Roman soldiers into the hills …”

  I would like to quarrel about that as well, for I am fearful every time he rides out with the emperor’s soldiers to face a hailstorm of arrows, but that is an argument I cannot win. Furthermore, I’m sure to make a fool of myself in such an argument when I’m running hot with desire for him. I do not understand this desire and how it can flourish in the grief and danger and drama of Aquileia. This is not a desire born of love or duty or sacrament. I fear that my husband has taught me to desire for desire’s own sake.

  The realization of it embarrasses me, but not so much that I pull away when he leans in for a kiss. Perhaps he only means it to be a tender kiss good night, but it swiftly turns hungry and breathless and in its aftermath, I am shy. “Juba, I thought you wanted a restful evening …”

  “Suddenly, I am not so very tired …”

  Good thing too, because we do not sleep.

  *

  THE dismissal of my poet is easily managed the next morning. Then Crinagoras sails away with the Herods and I do not know when, or if, I will ever see him again. My mouth goes sour with the taste of sending someone I care about into mortal danger. It is what rulers do, but if it all goes wrong, how will I forgive myself?

  Soon after the departure of the Herods, at the end of the month sacred to Juno, Julia gives birth. She asks me to play the part of the handmaiden and deliver the news to the emperor. I find him on the terrace overlooking a makeshift arena in which his soldiers have arranged an early-morning cockfight for his amusement. The emperor has been shown all the wonders of Greece, but in Aquileia, this cacophony of birds and men consumed with mindless bloodlust in the shadow of darkly forested hills is apparently the best sport to be found.

  “It is a boy,” I whisper in the emperor’s ear. “Big and healthy. Julia would like for him to be named Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa Postumus.”

  It is the emperor’s prerogative to choose the boy’s name, but he says, “I suppose it is only right. He’s Agrippa’s only son by law, as I’ve taken all the others.”

  I hear the note of satisfaction. Was it all for show, how hard he fought against adopting Gaius and Lucius? Or is it only now that Agrippa is dead that the emperor imagines the adoptions as a private victory over his ambitious general? “Shall I tell Julia you’re pleased by the birth of your grandson?”

  Staring down at the cockfight, he replies, “You shall tell Julia that she must marry Tiberius.”

  Neither the screeching of the birds nor the nip in the morning air chills me so much as the emperor’s words. “Tiberius? You cannot mean it. You cannot possibly mean to let Livia have her way.”

  The emperor clenches his teeth. “It’s a necessary measure.”

  “You are handing your empire over to the Claudians!”

  “I am handing nothing but Julia to Tiberius.”

  “That will be enough. Tiberius already has your legions. Now he will have your daughter too. What can Livia have possibly said to convince you to wedge her family into power at the expense of yours?”

  As the birds battling below us scratch and peck and claw, Augustus says nothing. Normally, he would challenge me to work out for myself the reasoning of his political decisions, but whatever is behind this one, he would rather I did not know. That is what shocks me, and my mouth drops open. “You suspect her. You suspect her of doing away with Agrippa. And you fear—”

  “I fear nothing.”

  I give a bitter laugh to stave off sudden bitter tears. “You fear Livia. You are afraid of your wife, and you should be because you can’t touch her now. You can’t do anything to her without risking that her sons will turn the legions against you in vengeance. You can’t even divorce her or get rid of her now. She has you trapped.”

  “Tread carefully, Selene,” the emperor warns.

  I go on, heedlessly laughing, near hysteria. “She has outsmarted you. She has outsmarted us all. Now the Claudians will have their way …”

  “They will think they do,” Augustus snaps, punctuating his words with a slap of his thigh. “With Tiberius as my son-in-law, there will be no need for them to scheme.”

  Tiberius is now the empire’s most notable general. He’s achieved more than any of his ancestors in more than two hundred years. All that, with a bloodline far more prestigious than the emperor’s. “Don’t do it,” I plead with him. “For the love of the gods, give Julia to someone else. Find someone strong enough to stand against Livia. Someone who needs Julia and her sons to cement a claim. Do not clear a path for the Claudians. Create a rival for them.”

  The emperor glares at me. “Who? You tell me who, Selene.”

  “Iullus Antonius! He’s a soldier. He has my father’s legacy behind him. He might hold it all together. My half brother would defend Julia and her children and you.”

  When the emperor leans forward, I think he’s considering it until I see the malice shining in his eyes. “I would sooner see Rome burned to ashes.”

  “Then you just might see it burn.”

  “Listen well, Selene. I will never give Mark Antony that victory over me. I took his daughter to my bed; his son won’t take mine.”

  This pronouncement is a slap to the face—a stinging reminder of how he took me by force. He told me I wanted it and he is not the only one to have accused me. My own husband blamed me for the emperor’s lust. Even I tried to convince myself that the emperor would never have done it without Livia’s encouragement. Now I know better. Now I know what was in his mind from the first moment he came to Alexandria. He wanted to take everything my father had, and when my mother escaped him in death, he turned his eyes to me. He was always going to rape me; always intended it. Nothing I did or didn’t do would have changed that. It was never my fault or Juba’s fault or even Livia’s fault. The crime was all his.

  Below us, a rooster falls bloody and defeated into the dirt.

  While the men cheer the victor, the emperor insists, “Tiberius must marry Julia. If my health should fail me while my heirs are still little boys—”

  “Then they’ll all be at Tiberius’s mercy. Julia and Gaius and Lucius …”

  “Not only them, Selene. You and your children too. Everyone who belongs to me. The only way to hinder the aspirations of Tiberius is to bind him to my legacy. My daughter must be his. My sons must be his. This will tie his hands.”

  The Tiberius I remember was a sour boy and a brooding young man who kept his own company but was never cruel without provocation. The trouble with Tiberius has always been his willingness to cater to his mother’s overweening ambitions. With the emperor gone, Livia will be free to take her revenge on all those she despises. We will be at her mercy, and perhaps that is what the emperor intends to protect us against.

  “It will be Tiberius,” he insists. “It must be Tiberius. Not Drusus, not Iullus, nor any other man I have not observed since his boyhood. We both know Tiberius’s nature. He never takes a risk if there is no promise of reward. He will be grateful to me for this marriage and it will buy us time, for he will never act against me if he believes that he must only wait for me to die …”

  “It’s a gamble. You’d rely upon Tiberius’s character and gratitude?”

  “And his love for my daughter. I’m told she can be very charming.”

  “Tiberius is besotted with his own wife. He doesn’t want Julia.”

  “She can change that. And you must persuade her to do it.”

  Twenty-six

  “SO now I am to seduce my own stepbrother for the good of Rome?” Julia bares her breast for her infant son, who is her child in a way none of the others have been. Sitting beside her on a couch in the inner courtya
rd, I sense in her a new mother’s fierceness. “My father doesn’t even have the courage to ask it of me. Instead, he sends the daughter of the woman he called the world’s greatest harlot to give me lessons. You don’t mind being used in such a way?”

  She’s entitled to her bitterness, so I take no offense at her words. Her position is altogether too familiar and it pains me to argue on her father’s behalf; I would not do so if I saw any other way. “The emperor intends to ask Tiberius to marry you. If you appear … unwilling … Julia, you do not want to be blamed for providing an excuse for Tiberius to refuse.”

  Julia’s nose wrinkles as if she has smelled something foul. “Either way, I will have the blame.”

  I take a breath before telling the truth as I see it. “I believe that your father is trying to secure your welfare. Yes, he is thinking of his own legacy and selfish desires, but he is also thinking of you and your children. What would happen if your father died tomorrow?”

  Julia’s eyes drift to the window with an expression that is either worry or wishfulness. “I would be a prize for the highest bidder, no different than now.”

  She’s being stubborn. She doesn’t know what it is to grow up at the mercy of a man who considers your every breath a danger to his ambitions. I’ve lost four brothers to the emperor’s fear and it would be naive to believe he’s the only man capable of such monstrous acts. A man who wished to rule Rome would smother Julia’s little children in their beds if given the chance.

  And that is to say nothing of what Livia might do.

  I must make Julia understand. “Until your sons come of age, they are in danger. We know Tiberius isn’t ambitious for his own sake. If you win his heart, he may defend your sons against his mother. Against all. He may come to love your children as his own.”

  “Now you’re thinking of your husband, Selene. Not Tiberius.”

  I dare not ask what she means by that or what she knows.